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EA: New Console Technology Is A "Giant Leap For Our Industry"

Many were disappointed at the lack of "oomph" found in the new PlayStation 4, although others claim the console is plenty powerful enough.

Electronic Arts is obviously in the latter category, as they're excited about what they'll be able to do with next-gen platforms. Speaking during a Morgan Stanley Technology, Media, And Telecom Conference, EA chief technology officer Rajat Taneja said the new era of consoles will provide us with phenomenal playing conditions.

"The console technology itself is a gigantic leap for our industry. Any which way you look at the specifications, it is step function over what exists today. The new consoles are between 8 and 10 times the power of the current generation."

Taneja said EA is primed and ready to deliver some amazing experiences. Firstly, the more accessible architecture is based on standard PC components and technology and therefore, EA's tools "will very smoothly run on these and make it easier for us to innovate." The entire process will be faster; he said that "what used to take months in the past, will now take days." And technically speaking:

"First, we no longer have to constrain our games or ration graphics or memory or bandwidth. We can let the games really flourish. 1080p, 60 frames per second, character physics on a much broader canvas, color saturation, lighting, particle effects; it will be a level of gameplay experience that is unprecedented, not been imagined before. It's going to create playing conditions for our gamers that are just going to be phenomenal."

Yes, I'm reading this, are you sure you want to gloat? I mean really sure? Let's take a quote and look at it shall we?

""The console technology itself is a gigantic leap for our industry. Any which way you look at the specifications, it is step function over what exists today. The new consoles are between 8 and 10 times the power of the current generation.""

How much more powerful was the PS3 vs the PS2? want to guess? You went from a dual core CPU running at 299MHZ to a 7 core CPU running at literally 10 times that clock speed. The cores on the Cell are at least twice as fast in terms of their instructions per clock tick. A conservative estimate of the relative power of Cell vs Emotion engine is that the Cell was 30-50 times faster than the Emotion Engine.

PS4 vs PS3. The 8 core jaguar is about as powerful as the Cell, the GPU is greatly more powerful than RSX. So, I'm sorry, where is this huge leap in performance this EA person is seeing? Oh, that's right it's on the GPU.

Regardless of your opinion (which is wrong) the specs are the specs. 8 Jaguar cores at 1.8GHz are not entirely the equivalent of 7 cores on Cell at 3GHz, though the are probably a little more efficient for double precision floating point (as would a more modern CellBE). The increase in power in the PS4 comes entirely from the GPU. The reason that EA and other devs are all jumping for joy is that the PS4 is a PC, so they only have to build a single basic game engine. The statements about power while factual are missing the point since they ar referring to the best case computational power in the GPU as if it's available to the system all the time - which it's not.

Don't worry though, this post will get thoroughly downvoted and yours will be lots of upvotes because your going along with the herd and baiting me, and my opinion on this matter is as popular as a fart in a space suit. Unfortunately though, like the fart in the spacesuit, my opinion has the stench of truth and is unavoidable.

But yes, lets jump for joy because we have a PC with a CPU that has roughly similar power to the CellBE in the PS3, but a better GPU. Yay us.

I agree about BF3. Even on my PC with a 670gtx and settings maxed, I just can't play it through again. I did once on PS3...wanting to quit a few times on the trek, but even with all of those PC bells and whistles the game is so ho-hum to my likes I just don't care to move on to the end again. But who plays BF3 for the single player right?

For games on consoles at least, it's a bit unnecessary to have a super cpu chip anyway if the RAM and GPU can more than make up for it. If we're talking about heavy calculations like video encoding/3D rendering or physics and gravity simulations in an environment such an OS running in the background, then it may matter more.

Right now, all that matters is that the PS4 is capable of producing great looking games. It's one thing if they looked like Nintendo's Zombie U, but it isn't. I'm personally convinced on what I've seen so far. And last I check, Shadow Fall was only optimized with about 2GB of RAM. They can do so much more with it, and that would go to other games shown and in the future. How can the developers not get excited about that?

Yeah right "The new consoles are between 8 and 10 times the power of the current generation.". Going by the Sony reveal of 2 TFLOPS the PS4 is more like 3x more powerful than the PS3, not even close to 8-10x.

For the record (and fun) Sony claimed 1.8 TFLOPS for the PS3 as well. As was discussed in another topic I think someone in Sony reasoned that since you could in theory take the 128-bit FP result of certain GPU floating point ops and break them down into 4 32-bit single precision results that meant that instead of 400GFLOPS (the theoretical figure for RSX) it was actually 1.6TFLOPS for RSX plus the 200GFLOPS from CellBE giving 1.8TFLOPS. Funny that the same number of TFLOPS is being touted for PS4 as being 8-10 times more than PS3....lol

Best case the GFLOPS from PS3 were about 600, and that puts PS3 about 3 times more powerful - theoretically.

Beamboom, yes the memory does make a big difference because you can load larger textures and use techniques that are otherwise impossible with tighter memory constraints.

Daus, for all the physics and other things that you want in a game like GT, you want as much CPU as you can get. The GPU is going to be tied up with running 1080p60 with full filtering and anti-aliasing and all manner of particle effects and post processing, so you really need that CPU power to be there to handle the physics of the game. CPU matters a lot more than most people want to to admit. The 'plus' here is that unlike the PS3 where really talented 1st party developers off-loaded some of the RSX work to the Cell, that won't be necessary for PS4, and so more of the CPU will be available for the physics. That said, the CPU in the PS4 is the weakest link in the chain in terms of being an upgrade from the PS3.

I think there's no argument here that the cpu in the PS4 isn't exactly first class nor was it a significant leap from the cell, and of course more cpu power will always prove better for physics calculations. That was one of my main point. My other main point is that we're talking about games.

Sure with more cpu power, a game like GT can have simulated physics equal to F1's multi-thousand dollar simulators. The only problem is that most people that want true 1 to 1 realism don't exactly look for them in a gaming console, especially on a budget standpoint. I was personally plenty satisfied with GT5's physics on the PS3, and it can only get better with the PS4. You say the gpu is going to be tied up with 1080p/60 but you're forgetting about the massive 8GB of GDDR5 RAM, which should definitely help with anti-aliasing and such.

Most people I know in GT5 drive with assists and racing softs anyway, so that shows that there's no need for GT to be a 1 to 1 simulation. If Kaz wants to do such thing, he's doing it in the wrong machine. However that's not to say GT5's physics was poor and unrealistic. In the future perhaps, it'll be possible in terms of "cost." Kaz will get that vision someday. Right now, Sony needs to find the optimum combination of power and affordability. They can't put world class cpu, ram, and gpu and be reasonably priced.

Again, we all know cpu is the weakest link in term's of the PS4's specs and improvement. That much is obvious, and there's no need to repeat it over and over again. It should be obvious to you that such talk of upgrades is regarding the GPU and RAM. It's not like anyone here is saying the CPU is better than the cell, or that the Jaguar Chip is awesome. Right now, we just have to see what kinds of games this thing will produce.

And this is one of the reasons I'm actually disappointed the PS3 is coming out this year versus next year. I understand that technology improvements can allow a slower clocked processor to get similar performance to a higher clocked CPU, thanks to various aspects of processing efficiency. The GPU and RAM are certainly a nice improvement, but I keep thinking that CPU will come back to bite them later.

I'd much rather have waited another year, and get some real improvements. What Highlander and Crabba said... I agree very much. I just don't see the miniscule improvements between PS3 and PS4 being nearly the value we got from the far more massive improvements from PS2 to PS3.

I'll probably buy one eventually, but I just don't know that I'm gonna feel rushed to upgrade too soon, especially when the jump doesn't seem that massive. With the cost to upgrade... I think I'll be happy with my PS3 for a little while yet.Last edited by richfiles on 2/28/2013 3:10:08 PM

I don't understand why they have to think graphics are so important. The BF3 MP is fun, but bad company 2 is so much better because it had a better story. Thats just me though. Killzone has the greatest Sci-Fi styled story i have ever had the pleasure to play. I think EA should take note and try and realize graphics don't make a game... Unless your Guerrilla. They mix amazing graphics, gameplay, and story. I hope i don't sigh and call out the entire story of BF4 in the first 6 minutes again.

See, unfortunately we're getting people complaining about the short leap of specs, but these are more likely the same people who complained about narrowed maps during this generation. Fuck graphics, seriously, it's nice, but there needs to be a balance. Crytek are a prime example of devs who have gone to far in taking pride with graphical prowess whilst all in all forgetting about the part where they actually have to make a GOOD game.

When I think of 8-10x better than that new GoW: Ascension demo... I don't think I can actually... I mean, holy crap.

We'll have all the power we'll need. The PS4 will take us to the top of the mountain we've been climbing since PSX. We've already seen glimpses of it with PS3's very best.Last edited by Temjin001 on 2/27/2013 1:08:56 AM

Regarding the negativity, continued bating and hostility towards one user seems to be at the heart of the issue.

Personally, I think the ease of programming will allow developers to innovate more and produce better games (gameplay wise). I do believe the graphics ceiling will be attained much sooner, so I do see this next generation (PS4) being shorter than this one (PS3), I'm thinking a five-years interval like it was in the 90's).

We will have to wait and see what developers do with this generation and how consumers react, before we can definitively say whether or not Sony's decision was the right one.

That reminds me on where EA was at Sony's show. I was a bit on looking forward to what Sports games would look like next gen. For NBA games at least, modeling of athletes and motion was far from perfect and definitely had room for improvement. I want to see if this upcoming generation will finally blur the line between reality and video game in motion and modeling of real life athletes.

Shooters like battlefield, we already have a Killzone/Destiny example, so I'm satisfied enough.

As for racing games like NFS from EA, I think DriveClub was a good enough indication. :)

I expect a showing at E3 EA, and please show us this enthusiasm of yours.

Let's hope that with the extra time available to devs from shorter development times, they use more of their imagination, resulting in games with more intriguing stories and characters. Let's hope that we also see new gaming concepts, broadening of the current genres.

Every artist need to master their tools before they can be truly creative. It's how creativity works.In fact, therein lies the entire secret why x86 has survived this long and continues to do so.

So yes, offering a developer friendly platform is possibly the best thing any hardware manufacturer can realistically do to nourish creativity on their system. That goes for anything from small handheld devices to huge systems.The reason why Google could take over the mobile market that fast, was due to them basing their system on established technologies: Linux and Java. Both are technologies with roots back to the 90s - before even the *term* "smartphone" were established.

A hardware engineer could easily argue why neither is the best choices to base a smartphone platform on - they would likely argue for designing the entire system from scratch, specifically for this purpose.The problems with engineers is that they don't really seem to understand the importance of the development environment. And at the end of the day it's the work of the developers who decides a products success - more so than the hardware engineer. And that, of course, is something that bites for the engineer.

This is what Sony now has realized, and the consequences of this realization is what we will all see the coming years.And then, in 5-6 years time, *then* we have the required hindsight to do a constructive discussion on what console they did the right architectural decision: The PS3 or the PS4.

it will be interesting to see how the "standards" of next gen games come.will they be 1080P @ 30FPS and have more effects going on, or 1080P @ 60FPS having to limit some of the features.id prefer 30FPS simply because that way you have more room to implement things people are going to notice, and that is the problem allot of people cant tell the difference between a game running at 30FPS and one running at 60.

Very much agree with Highlander, I hope they aim for 60 frames instead of an extra layer showrooom shine. It really makes a difference to the feel of the game.Last edited by Beamboom on 2/27/2013 2:11:45 PM

eh, im not really fussed.as long as we get the physics, AI, AA, lighting and particle effects were expecting than i can take or leave either.id much rather 1080P using ray tracing at 30FPS than without at 60FPS.the effects it gives off is just beautiful!interested to see if we start to see soft body physics start being used in games, and even voxels.still cant get that video on the unlimited detail engine out of my head, it just looked amazing!i remember reading a article in gameinformer about it a few months ago gameinformer had a several page interview with the companies lead programmer.the things there claiming with it are just incredible!so much more detail than todays games, AND it takes FAR less manpower!my god!if it delivers all its promises obviously.

I agree about the ray tracing at 30fps, but I don't believe that the PS4 will have the compute power to do that. IIRC the Intel engineer that put together a raytracing version of Doom3 used either a dual or quad i7 with quad SLI GPU support. Given that Kepler GPUs are around now and i7 now comes in more than quad core configurations, I'd think that fully raytraced games are achievable at the upper limit of a hardcore gaming rig. The PS4 is far from being that powerful.

Here's an article a bout the raytracing demo I mentioned, it was Wolfenstein that was being run. The original demo was in 2008, with the advances Intel has made since then, the demo that then required a cluster of 4 systems could easily be handled by a single i7 system with a modern GPU.

Then there is this from a year ago;http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/quake-wars-gets-ray-traced

"Performance is the main reason why ray tracing is not yet used in mainstream games. Compared to special-purpose rasterization graphics hardware-such as current-generation GPUs-ray tracing is fairly slow. Also, a lack of texture units for our CPU-based approach to ray tracing causes significant slowdowns when trilinear filtering is used for all texture samples. With Intel‚Äôs latest quad-socket systems-equipped with a 2.66 GHz Dunnington processor in each socket-we can achieve approximately 20 to 35 fps at a resolution of 1280x720. Nonetheless, this represents a significant improvement over the experiments in 2004 that required 20 machines to render a simpler game more slowly and at a lower resolution."

So, year ago, Intel had a game running on a quad CPU system at reasonable resolutions and frame rates using real time ray tracing. Note that the article explains that the ray tracing is being done on the CPU, and that GPU assistance would make things better. Jump forward a year to today, Intel have 8 core i7 processors running over 3GHz, and there are GPGPUs that are extremely capable with regard to the work that real time raytracing requires. I would be unsurprised if real time ray tracing is actually a viable option at 720p60 at least, if not 1080p30 this year on top end systems. And you know that will only continue to get better with time.

yea i know its my pipe dream.:(nvidias garage demo which consists of 1 Bugatti veyron being ray traced, and that on my hex core I7 OCd to 4.8 and dual GTX 670 OC 4GBs struggles to get above 30FPS.i have my serious doubts even high end PCs would be able to do ray traced games.

but other things like soft body physics, MSAA, and other techniques to clean up the images is another story.exactly why id rather have 30FPS to be honest, have higher AA, motion blur, better physics, better lighting, ect.

The PS4 specs are touted as 104 GFLOPS for the CPU and 1.8TFLOPS for the GPU - Single precision.

There is a problem though. The performance of the Jaguar cores is untested, so it's kind of being assumed that they are double that of the trinity cores in existing APUs. Assumptions are never a good idea.

When you start looking at the potential AMD GPU components that could be included in the AMD APU inside the PS4, things really do not get encouraging.

The AMD GPU architecture Sony supposedly use is supposed to have only 8 render output units. The nearest equivalent in AMD's specification information is not equipped with double precision hardware. The Radeon HD7670 which is the best performing version with 8 render output units can only manage 768GFLOPS. And it doesn't come with double precision capability, in software it manages a horrible 12GFLOPS double precision. If they equip their GPU with the South Island double precision unit it will do better, and if we assume that they will up number of units so that the claimed 1.8TFLOPS is matched on AMDs specification for the South Island architecture, we're looking at something closer to the 7850. Although that unit has 4 times the number of rumored render output units, and far, far more hardware than the GPU we've been told about.

The nearest AMD unit that can manage 1.8TFLOPS in double precision is a stratospherically expensive workstation component. It's crystal clear that the 1.8TFLOPS are single precision results, which tosses this GPU back into the middle of the pack in terms of available GPU hardware from AMD.

The point is that a top of the range single CPU, single GPU PC gaming ring could have anything from 5TFLOPS single precision (1.5TFLOPS double precision) with i7/GK110, or 6TFLOPS single precision and about 1.6 TFLOPS Double precision with the best that AMD can offer. You could go with dual CPU and GPU configurations which would yield - for example 10TFLOPS single precision and 3 TFLOPS double precision performance in a desktop gaming rig. Yes, you'd spend a lot of money on that, yes you'd be able to heat your house with it, but the point is, that hardware could be rightly called a beast.

By comparison, the PS4 hardware is in truth nothing like as powerful. The TFLOP figure given for the GPU portion of the processor in the PS4 is inflated, either they are simply quoting the raw single precision capability, and not even touching the software emulated double precision figure, or they don't yet have a figure for the double precision hardware (if they are including it). Either way, based on the AMD documentation, the double precision capability of the architecture in question is quite poor, we are at best looking at this single precision - 2TFLOPS and double precision 215 GFLOPS. Yes, that is correct. The closest GPU in the South Island series with 1.8TFLOPs claimed for single precision (HD7850) has hardware to handle double precision calculations and it has a maximum capability of 110GFLOPS. That said it also has 1024 unified shaders, 64 texture mapping units and 32 render output units. That's far more units than are claimed for the GPU that Sony is using.

In my personal opinion, the GPU in the PS4 is potentially not terribly strong at all - not compared to the discrete GPUs a gaming PC would be built using. Something somewhere in the claimed specifications is not adding up. Certainly, the claimed TFLOPS are illusory, just as they were with the PS3. That leaves me wondering why there is all the hype and ballyhoo about this thing.

You are way too kind Highlander, the sad fact is that no one in their right mind would build even a budget gaming PC with the kind of GPU from the PS4 specs.

Right now, you can buy a 7870 graphics card with 2GB GDDR5 dedicated video RAM for $200, note that's CONSUMER PRICING, NOW. By holidays 2013 in time for PS4 launch that price is guaranteed to be even lower than that, again consumer price.

For Sony manufacturing just the GPU in huge quantities costs would be FAR lower, and considering the GPU is by far the most important component for gaming it is really puzzling why they would instead choose to use an old low-end deprecated GPU for their next-gen console, that's presumably supposed to last for the next 5-7 years...

dude, the 3930K is 400 bucks here!and dont forget that is CONSUMER price, not the price $ony would be paying ordering so many of them.i love it though it overclocks so easily!OCd mine to 4.8GHz and thats on air cooling, im thinking of getting a custom water loop put in.

titan is WAY overkill unless your running in ultra HD, and 3 monitors.6GBs GDDR5 VRAM is a little over the top.a 660ti would be a better example, the standard base card every manufacture puts as standard in there system until people rip it out and upgrade it.

Beamboom, that is precisely WHY I quoted those components. I want to illustrate to everyone the ridiculous nature of the claims made for the PS4 spec. The very fact that a gaming rig can be built right now, with a consumer grade chip and GPU each of which cost the expected price of the PS4; should be sufficient to tell everyone here that the expected capabilities of the PS4 fall far, far short of even an average gaming rig built today, never mind one built in 8 months time when PS4 goes on sale. The point here was to get people to realize that the hardware in the PS4 is...not...that...great. It just isn't, and I don't care what EA, or Carmack, or Newell, or CliffyB or anyone else says. In pure hardware terms this system is utterly ordinary.Last edited by TheHighlander on 2/28/2013 12:29:35 PM